I always love hearing Australians (and New Zealanders) whenever they quite naturally use metric without any second thoughts or attempts to convert to Imperial. So it was for me listening to Rick Steves show on NPR as this Australian woman talked about her guide book to India and how to travel there. Without missing a beat, she talked about the length of some itinerary in kilometers. No Imperial on her part, and no attempt by Steves to convert to Imperial. Quite nice.
My one quibble (I don't like having them, but there it is) is that she said kill-AH-meters instead of KILL-oh-mee-ters, but I'll take it either way. Any chance Americans have to hear native speakers of English use SI helps them (or at least most of them, I'll wager) get the message bit by bit to break the old mental equivalence of metric and "foreign" (i.e. non-English). Ezra
